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The stories of marathon runners collapsing and dying at the finish line are enough to scare
anybody thinking of participating in one of the 26.2-mile races popular this time of year.

A new study by Johns Hopkins researchers, however, has found that the risk of death at marathon
races is pretty low; not impossible, but not all that likely either.

A runner’s risk of dying during or soon after the race is about 0.75 per 100,000 people running,
the research found. Men were twice as likely to die as women.

“It’s very dramatic when someone dies on the course, but it’s not common,” Julius Cuong Pham,
the study’s lead author and an associate professor of emergency medicine, anesthesiology and
critical-care medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a statement.

The study was published online in
The American Journal of Sports Medicine.

“There are clearly many health benefits associated with running,” Pham said. “It doesn’t make
you immune, but your risk of dying from running a marathon is very, very low.”

Pham and his colleagues found that, between 2000 and 2009, 28 people died during or in the 24
hours following a marathon. Half of those who died were older than 45, and all but one in that age
group died of heart disease. Younger runners died from a variety of reasons that included cardiac
arrhythmia and hyponatremia, or drinking excessive amounts of water.

The Hopkins research looked at statistics from about 300 marathons per year and found that the
number of finishers increased dramatically between 2000 and 2009, from 299,018 to 473,354.

Pham said the benefits of marathon running include decreased risks of hypertension, high
cholesterol and diabetes. People who run regularly have been found to have lower rates of early
death and disability.

But marathon running is not risk-free, Pham said. Studies have shown the yearly incidence of
injury in people training for marathons is as high as 90 percent.